Snakeskin
by Metronome I Hear
Summary: What would you do to survive in a world that does not care if you live or die? SI as fem!Orochimaru. Rating subject to change.
1. Chapter 1

She laughed.

Stood atop a pile of bones, impossibly high, she laughed. Her arms thrown out to the side, her feet planted firmly on the ground, her head tossed back towards the sky, she laughed.

Victory. Glory and ruin. She survived it all.

(_Oh? That's good, then._)

She who stood clad in a kimono stained with blood-the sage, the Sannin, the snake-laughed. She looked up at the sky of this world she had been born to and laughed, for she'd done it. Done the impossible, overcome the odds. She stood at the end of it all, victorious over her foes. And yet, still she ached. (_Really now? But isn't this what you wanted?_) Deep in her soul she ached in away she could not explain. It was a wound on her very being, impossibly deep and unhealing.

This, perhaps, was the reason humans were not meant to be reborn.

She bowed over, clutching her aching gut, and still she laughed. Tears streamed down her face, and still she laughed. Her body, her soul, all her being ached, and still she laughed.

Eventually, you had to wonder why she wasn't screaming instead.

...

_Dear God,_

_All of it, it was for survival._

_All of it._

_And I survived._

…

"Chiyo-san tells me you wish to become a shinobi."

Yamata Yuuto crossed his arms and stared down at his only child, a daughter who looked like her mother and had the markings of his clan. She sat with perfect poise, her mother's inky black hair spilling over kimono clad shoulders, and nodded.

"I do, Honorable Father." Her voice was soft, her words firm, and Yuuto knew without a shadow of a doubt that his daughter was afraid.

"Why do you fear, daughter?" he asked. For as long as he's known her, his daughter had always feared. It permeated her being, affected her every action. It was the reason she once fled the family compound, and the reason she eventually came back.

He had asked this question before. Never has he gotten an honest answer.

"I am not afraid," Orochimaru, his daughter of blood, his only child, _his legacy,_ said to him.

Yuuto frowned, but did not comment. Instead what he said was thus:

"You will attend the academy come April. Be prepared, my daughter."

And that, it seemed, was that.

…

Chiyo was long and wrapped around her shoulders like a scarf. Her scales were dark and dry and smooth against her skin. Orochimru laid one hand upon her muscular body as she walked, as if to cling to the snake summon who served as her teacher, protector, and nurse.

"You're honorable father is kind," she said, a faint hiss in her voice as vocal cords not meant for human speech contorted to produce such sounds.

"Is he?" Orochimaru asked. She walked down the street on her lonesome, all of three years old, with Chiyo her only company. The streets were filled with people-civilians, shinobi, and children with the potential to become either. The air about them was tense, as it had been for as long as Orochimaru could remember, because Konoha was at war.

Or no. That was not quite right. Orochimaru-

_Amelia_

-can remember longer than that.

"He is," Chiyo insisted. Her tail flicked Orochimaru's cheek, and then pointed to a stand selling takoyaki. "There, look. Buy some for yourself. As celebration."

Orochimaru nodded and walked to the stand. She ordered some, and remained silent as the takoyaki was made, and paid for it without a word when it is done. Then she continued her walk through the streets of Konoha.

"You do not agree," Chiyo noted.

"Hm?"

"You do not agree that your honorable father is kind."

Orochimaru allowed herself a smile.

"He is sending me to war. What part of that is kind?"

**...**

**Well... Never thought I'd get around to posting this, considering how long it's been sitting in my docs.**

**Consider this a drabble series of sorts. Most chapters will likely be short. **


	2. Chapter 2

A little girl sat before a mirror; posture proper, back straight, and a brush held in one limp hand. She stared at her reflection, her expression distant and dull, and was utterly, unnaturally still.

Her face was wrong, she thought. Her eyes are green, not yellow. Her pupils should be round. Her skin should not be this pale, her hair should not be this dark.

Her grip on the brush tightened until her knuckles were white. She screamed, loud and anguished and _angry._ The mirror shattered when the brush crashed against it, and her fingers bleed from the broken glass.

She was only three.

(_She should have been twenty-four._)

...

The first time Orochimaru ran away, she was three years old. It was August and the air was chilled with incoming winter, and the people were tense and silent on the streets. Her uncle Eizo had been dead for two weeks, and his funeral had not yet been held. It would be three months before she would sit with her father and discuss her entrance into the Academy, and Orochimaru-_Amelia_-was tired.

She did not want this, does not want any of this. Did not want the power she had been given, the body that she wore, or the face of a villain that stared back at her in the mirror. Did not want the expectations placed upon her as daughter of the clan head, did not want the knowledge of where she was and what, exactly, was to come.

Konohagakure was at war, and it would only be the first of many.

On wednesday night, after the sun had set and the clan had gone to sleep, Orochimaru got out of bed, pulled on clothing she had set out for this very purpose, and left. It was a simple thing to avoid her family when their chakra, when all chakra, was so very loud in her ears.

This, too, was something she did not want.

She wandered the village, away from the tiny compound which housed her tiny clan. They were only five now that Eizo was dead. Only five, when once they were so much larger.

She wandered into and through alleyways, walking without any real aim. Her only goal was to go away, away from her family, away from her responsibilities, away from the future that loomed ever present before her.

Eventually, she came to a tree.

The buildings of the Konoha were built into and around the trees that grew here. The forest was as much a part of the village as the village was a part of the forest, and the village sang with the soft chakra of the wood, omnipresent everywhere she went. This tree, however, was separate from any buildings around it and towered above all the others.

She walked up to it, placed her foot upon the trunk, and began to climb. The bark was rough beneath her fingertips, the wood grown in such a way that it seemed less like it was a single tree grown and more like a great number of trees that had fused together through time. She climbed her way higher and higher and higher in this tree, until she found herself a spot to settle among its highest branches.

It was here Senju Tobirama found her, hours later in the early morning.

"What are you doing up here, child?" the Nidaime Hokage asked, his face stoic and calm and strangely out of place in this tall, tall tree. He did not look tired, did not look like he was grieving, but his chakra was heavy with the feeling of it. Senju Hashirama had been dead for less than four months, a casualty of war the entire village raged about. His death was a banner for them to rally behind, and it only made the war bloodier.

Orochimaru-who-was-Amelia-but-cannot-be-her-any-longer looked up at this man, weighed by grief and strife and the wellbeing of an entire village. She looked at him, this tragic man she knew would die soon and, for reasons she does not entirely understand, told the truth.

"I've run away, Hokage-sama." She pulled her knees tighter against her chest and leaned against the trunk of the tree. "And now I'm hiding."

Tobirama looked at her, something tugging his lips down, and sat on the branch before her. "Why?"

"Because I'm scared." She said. "We are at war. I have been born in a shinobi clan. One day my parents will send me to the academy and I will learn to kill and then I will be sent out to do just that."

She paused for a moment and Tobirama said nothing as she gathered her thoughts. "My uncle is dead," and she said this with a lightness that betrayed the gravity of such a statement. "I do not want to die like he did."

Tobirama seemed to mull over his thought, turning them over in his head and dissecting their every avenue, before he spoke again. "My brother," he said, and there was grief laced in his voice, "grew this tree with mokuton."

She looked at him for she did not understand.

"That was… about a week after the Uchiha signed the peace treaty with the Senju. I remember him standing there, on that day, grinning. He said that he wanted to grow something to celebrate the village's founding. A monument, he called it. Something to celebrate the fact his dream came true.

"My brother, for as long as I can remember, has always dreamed of peace. Dreamed of a world where clans do not have to send their children out to die. It was why he fought so hard for this place, when everyone told him he was a fool for dreaming of it. Child, the reason this village exists, and the reason this tree stands, is so that you do not have to fight and die."

Hours later, when the sun shone high in the sky, Orochimaru stood on the steps of her clan's compound and watched as her mother sprinted from the front door to take her in her arms.

She said nothing as Airi clung to her and cried.


End file.
